This new tomato hybrid is indestructible — and getting...

1of5The Green Bee is bred to stand up to grilling and has been used at Sabio on Main in Pleasanton, seen here.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

2of5The Green Bee tomato, developed by a Bay Area farmer, is a durable tomato that can stand up to grilling. It is used by Sabio on Main in Pleasanton.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

3of5The Green Bee tomato, developed by a Bay Area farmer, is a durable tomato that can stand up to grilling. It is used by Sabio on Main in Pleasanton.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

4of5Green Bee tomato toast at Sabio on Main in Pleasanton.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

5of5The Green Bee is bred to stand up to grilling and has been used at Sabio on Main in Pleasanton (above) and Boulevard in S.F.Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

At Sabio on Main in Pleasanton, in the dead of winter, chef Francis X. Hogan was serving something unheard of in the Bay Area. On the menu were locally grown, vine-ripened tomatoes. They were not only green, uncharacteristically crunchy and imbued with an astonishing flavor of stone fruit, but were still in peak condition — even after being harvested two months earlier.

This mind-boggling, palate-perplexing cherry tomato is the Green Bee, a new hybrid created by a Bay Area geneticist-turned-farmer and tomato breeder named Fred Hempel. After spending the last seven years perfecting it, he is now making the seeds, seedlings and tomatoes widely available to the public for the first time.

“It took a while for me to figure out how to use them,’’ says Hogan, whose restaurant is owned by Pleasanton entrepreneur Jim McDonnell, an investor in Hempel’s Artisan Seeds company. “All of Fred’s tomatoes have a distinct earthiness, but these have a green plum flavor. You can sear them or grill them without them turning to mush. Their potential is so great. It opens up a completely new door.”

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Boulevard in San Francisco has used the Green Bee stealthily for the past four years, going through as many as 50 pounds a week in the summer. But it was only last year that Hempel felt ready to unveil the creation publicly, and allowed the restaurant to refer to the tomato by its actual name on its menus.

Dana Younkin, Boulevard’s chef de cuisine, likes to feature the Green Bees in a summer tomato salad alongside soft heirlooms to juxtapose their unusual texture. She has also featured them as a naturally sweet garnish for scallops, and in a salsa verde, in which they are blanched and then peeled to reveal smooth green orbs. They are also good in a quick pickle brine, because unlike most other tomatoes, they hold up well in vinegar.

The Green Bee tomato, developed by a Bay Area farmer, is a durable tomato that can stand up to grilling. It is used by Sabio on Main in Pleasanton.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

She still remembers how perplexed she was the first time she tried them. “We first thought they weren’t ripe,’’ she says. “That crispiness is deceiving. Once you taste them, they deliver incredible sweetness and the umami of a traditional cherry tomato, but with a lot more texture.’’

Like Younkin, Hogan prefers to use the Green Bees raw or barely cooked, featuring them blended in gazpacho, blistered alongside duck breast, and smoked over applewood to create a chunky salsa to top burgers. He shies away from any type of long cook, such as a marinara sauce, which he believes destroys this tomato’s key attributes.

In the past two decades, Hempel has created 20 new varieties of tomatoes. The Blush, an elongated marbled yellow cherry tomato with yellow stripes and a taste reminiscent of tropical fruit, is probably his best known; it is now grown by gardeners around the world.

He creates each one the same painstaking way, using tweezers to transfer pollen from one plant to another. Once the hybrid seeds mature, he plants them. Sometimes the hybrid plant becomes a new variety; other times, the process must be repeated again and again until Hempel gets what he’s after.

For the Green Bee, his goal was to create a great-tasting tomato with a long shelf life. He incorporated the naturally occurring rin gene, which has been used for years to breed long-shelf-life supermarket tomatoes. Using a tomato with that gene, he crossed it with his favorite high-flavor tomatoes, including Sungold and Blush. The result was the Green Bee, a tomato in which the softening characteristic is largely blocked so that it ripens in flavor yet stays crisp.

The Green Bee tomato, developed by a Bay Area farmer, is a durable tomato that can stand up to grilling, as served by Sabio on Main in Pleasanton.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

“You can’t pick these tomatoes too late,” he says. “Leave them growing for a few extra weeks. When they start blushing yellow, they are ready.’’

Hempel considers this tomato such an achievement that he’s not only devoting half of his 1-acre in Sunol to growing them this year, but he has also renamed his Baia Nicchia farm as Green Bee Farm, in honor of the tomatoes and the metallic green-bodied bees that inhabit the property.

“I do consider Green Bee to be one of the best varieties we have bred,’’ he says. “Since it is so unique, it will soon be the most important variety we have.’’

He has partnered with the pioneering Chef’s Garden in Ohio, which will be growing the Green Bee to distribute to New York restaurants, and Heirloom Farms in Mexico, which will do the same to Southern California restaurants.

Younkin can’t wait to highlight them again this summer. “They are an important, cutting-edge new product,’’ she says. “They’re one of the most interesting produce items I’ve had in recent times.’’

More Information

More information: Green Bee seed packets ($4.95) are available at Artisan Seeds, www.store.growartisan.com. Flatland Flower Farm will sell Green Bee seedlings at the Saturday Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco beginning this month. Fred Hempel will sell seedlings at his Green Bee Farm in Sunol, May 1-15, through preorders. He’ll also sell flats of Green Bee tomatoes at his farm, July through late fall, via preorders with prearranged pick-up times. For preorders, email fred@growartisan.com

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Bay Area freelance writer Carolyn Jung blogs at FoodGal.com and is the author of the forthcoming cookbook“East Bay Cooks.” Email: food@sfchronicle.com